not surprising that sex is the furthest thing from all of our minds. If it is discussed at our antenatal classes, it is discussed in a clinical sort of way with off-putting words like ‘penetration’, ‘intercourse’ or ‘stimulation’ used. Now, if George Clooney were to show up and take the class over a glass of wine in a bar, things might be different. But near the Sanitary Waste bucket next to the foetal monitor, lovemaking is never going to be at the forefront of anyone’s mind.
So, before I pull the rabbit out of the hat and reveal how sex and birth are so closely linked, I need to break the postnatal conspiracy of silence over the issue of sex after birth, to show you why it is worth doing a little extra work on yourself and your relationship in your pregnant state. If you are in a relationship, ignoring the importance of sex is never going to work. After money, it is the main reason why couples fight. It will raise its head (as it were) at some stage after the birth, and you have a lot more time and energy to explore your feelings before the baby comes than afterwards. Sex is also going to become an issue after the birth anyway, when you suddenly find yourself in a twilight world where breastfeeding, exhaustion, resentment, broken nights and a grumpy partner make the good old days of a Sunday morning romp the stuff of fantasy. Now, not later, is the time to wise up to your womanhood, even if you would really rather prefer to flick through cute baby catalogues.
Sorting Out Your Sex Life
Many women won’t need any prompting to look at their sexual selves, and those lucky types will find that the pregnancy hormones will make them feel gorgeous, glowing, blossoming and at the very height of their sexual prowess. Already up the duff, so no thought of contraception necessary, they can toss their inhibitions to the wind, revel in their burgeoning breast size and feel confident in expecting a little bit more gratification from their partners in return for bestowing their bounty upon them. Even these women, vital and brimming with life, will need to protect themselves from other females, some of whom will be unable to stop themselves from cutting them down in their prime. If you do receive a bitchy comment about your increasing size, remember to quip back how much your partner just loves the new you. Then practise your Miss Piggy hair flick and walk away.
Whatever Floats Your Boat
There is no easy way to bring up the topic of bisexuality, so I am going to launch right in there. First, it often appears in fantasy form during pregnancy. It may be hormones, or something to do with your changing shape and your body image changing with it, or it may be the increasingly unwelcome notion of a rough, masculine touch when all is taut and tender. In Becoming a Mother by Kate Mosse (no, not the supermodel, wake up at the back, please) one woman explains rather explicitly:
I used to think ‘I wish I was with a woman.’ I had this feeling all the way through my pregnancy and this was for two reasons: one, all my women acquaintances, friends, were so appreciative of my changing shape. I had so many compliments about my bump, I can’t tell you, and they genuinely meant it, they think it’s beautiful. And two, because I just thought a woman would know how to make love in such a way (what I wanted was to be licked, sucked; even being touched with fingers could be too intrusive and painful) …
So much for the fantasy, but what of the reality? Well, out of bi-curiosity I asked eight of my closest friends if they had ever snogged a girl or more, and a (surprising) six said ‘yes’. Their forays usually took place in their early twenties (and usually under the influence of drink or drugs, where boundaries are fudged anyway) but that straw-poll indicates quite how on your doorstep the bisexual issue might be. Of those bi-curious six, five have gone on to get married and have children, so their experiences mostly point to a flowering of their early sexual selves. One even suggested that ‘all women are fundamentally gay’, but that we have switched off that part and chosen not to pursue it. While I wouldn’t necessarily agree, I would say that bisexuality is still taboo in a way that lesbianism no longer is. A lesbian who has ‘come out’ has weathered the reactions and disapproval of family, friends and neighbours to be her own person and find support within a recognized group. Someone who has had bisexual dalliances might be nothing more than keen to cover it all up.
Pressing my confessing friends further, I find that their flirtations with the same sex can be put down to everything from horniness to boarding school and missing Mummy, from a painful break-up to becoming a radical feminist, from confusion to vulnerability – all understandable emotions and situations that didn’t determine their future sexual proclivities. But carrying around the knowledge of these forays has been a weight for some of them.
If you sit in one of the six seats occupied by my friends, now might be a good time to process this aspect of yourself. Write it out in your pregnancy journal, speak your mind to a friend who’s also been there, or raise the subject generally with your partner (even the most prudish man entertains top-shelf magazine fantasies of Dos Lesbianos en la Piscina). Don’t just stamp it down, and don’t believe that because you are now entering a new, ordered, conservative world of pinnies and nappies that you can suppress this side of yourself. You can’t. It will come back and haunt you, and may translate in the most unexpected way. One of the six admitted that the ten-year-old memory had stopped her from pursuing friendships with other local mothers, in case there might be something ‘inappropriate’ in her manner. The only thing inappropriate in this loyal friend’s behaviour was her own self-sabotage because of her ‘guilty secret’. Don’t let that be you.
If, like me, you reside in the other two-eighths of the group, a hetero square-o that has never crossed that line, don’t be quick to judge anyone else. Otherwise, you might find yourself looking back from the other side of forty, putting out the milk bottles after tucking up the children in bed, thinking ‘Mmm, maybe in my pursuit of men of all sizes, ages, shapes and colours, I missed out on something here.’ Perhaps ‘love is universal’ (as one friend offered by way of explanation for her own Sapphic sorties). But you, for all your suburban riches, will never know. And Madonna, Britney and Christina are never likely to ask you to join them on stage to find out.
Sex to Start Labour
A week overdue with my first child, I arrived in hospital barely in labour and announced that I wasn’t leaving until I had had the baby. I was fed up with being pregnant and felt like a lumbering elephant. After my contractions had slowed to nothing again, a midwife walked into the room and whispered to me that I should go home and make love to my husband ‘because sperm can start labour’. Certainly nobody had told me at the antenatal classes that semen is the richest source of prostaglandin, a hormone that acts as a trigger to start labour. I wish they had. I could have done with a bit of fun at that stage, and it may have saved me a few hot curries and bumpy car rides up the road. Especially when the gels and pessaries that I was then offered to get things going were ‘synthetic prostaglandin’ – in other words, artificial spunk.
Reading through my pregnancy diary for this chapter, I was surprised to find that my very last entry while I was overdue and waiting to go into labour involved a long and detailed sexual fantasy that I had at 4 a.m. in the morning. Trying to decipher my scrawly handwriting in the dark was less interesting than the retrospective realization that on some level perhaps my mind and body were trying to work together to get labour going. To think that if I had told my sleeping husband that fantasy in the morning, I might have got labour off to a quicker start. As it was, the last sentence of my pregnancy journal reads ‘Outrageous!’ Outrageous? That was nothing compared to what was about to follow.
Listen to the Hippies, Man
While my first labour might have got going quicker with a little more intimacy, some of our friends across the pond have been using sex in birth since the 1960s. Ina May Gaskin wrote the first edition of Spiritual Midwifery in 1975, and says in the Introduction, ‘Generally speaking, the more comfortable a woman is living in her body, the more easily she gives birth.’ She was writing at a time of hippie idealism, when a group of around 300 people had come together in San Francisco to tour the country in camper vans until